CM Simpson: Writer & Gamer

To celebrate this month's release of Another 365 Days of Poetry which released on the 4th. Links to the collection can be found at: https://books2read.com/u/bo2Y0a .   An Introduced Pest   Written as an example of a Crapsey Type 2 cinquain, for A Year of Writing Poetry , I’ve assigned this to the May 17th entry of Another 365 Days of Poetry .   Raptors. Experiments gone badly wrong, escaped to roam a world not yet ready. Alone   Cover art is by Jake at JCaleb Design, and links to 366 Days of Poetry can be found on Books2Read at: https://books2read.com/u/bo2Y0a.  

Just a quick note to let you know that The Rocky Adventures Omnibus released today! Very excited, but I’m in the middle of finishing off the next book in the Mack ‘n’ Me ‘n’ Odyssey series, so I can’t stop and chat. Have a great day, all! The Rocky Adventures Omnibus is available direct from Amazon , Smashwords , DriveThruFiction, Google Play , and Kobo , and via Smashwords and Draft2Digital distribution. More links can be found at Books2Read.   Being a big brother isn’t easy—especially when your sister believes her Teddy is on a mission to save the world. And all because you said so. From trying to rescue his parents, to saving Christmas, to protecting his sister from rogue kitties, moon dragons and ravenous velociraptors, Rocky discovers some things never change—and that being a brother is one of them. The Rocky Adventures Omnibus collects the six stories following Rocky’s adventures as he travels from Earth to the distant world of Tallonna, where his family w...

The cover for, Just a Dinosaur, my third release in June has been approved. I'm a little bit excited and a little bit nervous about this, all at the same time. I've written something contemporary that feels a little bit like horror, and a little bit like urban fantasy, and a little bit like an archaeological adventure story. It's also set in a bush-setting as opposed to an urban environment and, editing it, I thought it touched on some of the stereotypes we see in Australian culture, hopefully both acknowledging and challenging them. It's not what I set out to do on purpose, but something that came through as the story came into being. This tale is due out on June 30.

A response for a Chuck Wendig Flash Fiction Challenge . I keep forgetting how much I love the way these exercises ignite a creative spark. This week I rolled a d20 and got to set a story in a penal colony built by elvish astronauts. A thousand words isn't a lot of space to build a character, a history, and establish a setting, especially when you know nothing about it when you start. Now, I want to know a lot more, to explore this new universe of mine and see what other stories lie within. And this is why I love these challenges. This response, excluding the title, is exactly 1,000 words long, so come and meet Hasken: Hasken's Choice The first guard doubled over at 1800 hours. Dusk. According to one movie, ‘magic hour’. None of the inmates had heard of the movie, let alone seen it. If they had, they would have recognized old history – an entire species wiped out by the ingenuity of man. No wonder the elves had been angry. The dragons had been a trap – an elven trap,...

Well, this was one very difficult piece to write. I very nearly gave up on it, but I didn’t. It got to 1,300-and-a-bit words and I took a pruning saw to it, but it seems to have come out okay. This thousand-word limit teaches a lot about what can be trimmed and what can’t. Good lessons to apply when writing longer pieces, too. This story is a result of the latest Chuck Wendig terribleminds blog flash fiction challenge: Epic Game of Aspects Redux . Sub-genre randomly rolled was 'fan fiction'; problem was 'family torn apart'; element to include ended up being 'sea monster'. So, like all fanfics, this piece is not endorsed, recognized or sanctioned by the creator of the game on which it's based. Because of my total discomfort about writing something not a hundred percent my own, the only trademarked name used is 'zuleps' and the rest can be tweaked so that it resides wholly in my own world. This story is exactly 1,000 words long, and was ...